1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a metal sheet receiving system for receiving metal sheet parts and feeding a metal sheet folding machine, particularly a folding press, comprising at least one manipulator for seizing and moving metal sheet parts, with a gripper head fitted with gripping means; an electronic control device for controlling the movement of the manipulator, as well as a measuring system for determining the position of the metal sheet parts. Furthermore, the invention relates to a method for picking up metal sheet parts from a stack of such parts, and for positioning such metal sheet parts in a metal sheet folding machine, particularly a folding press by means of a metal sheet receiving system comprising at least one manipulator for seizing and moving the metal sheet parts with a gripper head fitted with gripping means; an electronic control device for controlling the movement of the manipulator, as well as a measuring system for determining the position of the metal sheet parts.
2. Prior Art
Conventional metal sheet receiving systems for metal sheet folding machines, particularly for folding presses, comprise a manipulator in most cases, which is positioned in a defined position upstream of the metal sheet processing machine and feeds the metal sheet parts to the folding press from a readying system. The exact position for gripping the metal sheet parts, which is a precondition that must be satisfied for their exact placement in the press, can be set by exactly aligning the metal sheet parts in the readying system, on the one hand, or by detecting the alignment of the edges of the metal sheet parts by means of a special, in most cases mechanical detector device, on the other hand. However, such methods require complicated devices and have been found to be very time-consuming on the one hand, and relatively imprecise on the other. Another possibility is to implement a metal sheet recognition method by means of sensors arranged on the manipulator, which permits dispensing with an exact alignment of the metal sheet parts in the readying device.
DE 196 39 590 A1 describes a folding center comprising a feeding device with a placement table, as well as a manipulator arrangement, among other components. For improving the feeding rates, the feeding device has a sensor which determines the position of the received metal sheet part in relation to a defined position for feeding said part into a folding cell. In an advantageous embodiment, the sensor is formed by a light barrier arranged on a fork. The drawback here is that any clear distinction or determination of the metal sheet parts is highly time-consuming, and furthermore not feasible in each case particularly with shapes of metal sheets that are very similar to one another.